Assembling the Past
This AI work reimagines a verbal interview with Ian Lambot — co-author of City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City — tracing the unlikely arc of a life shaped more by curiosity than intention. Published in 1993, City of Darkness documents the final years of Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City through hundreds of photographs, oral histories, and essays. It revealed, against the grain of the city's notorious reputation, a self-sufficient community with its own economy, social networks, and quiet dignity — ordinary people making an extraordinary place work.
Ian trained as an architect and worked briefly for the Richard Rogers Partnership before arriving in Hong Kong in 1979, where he lived for the next 18 years. In that time he ran an architectural model-making studio, contributed to the early stages of the HSBC headquarters project with Foster and Partners, and gradually discovered that what he was really making was books. He founded Watermark Publications, through which he has since published widely on architecture, engineering, and design. He now lives in the UK, where he continues to publish books on subjects that interest him.
The Untaken Photo
The AI work "Untaken Photo" is not a photograph, nor is it purely fantasy. It is a synthetic reconstruction of a lost memory. It was born from a collaboration with Canadian photographer Greg Girard. The concept originated from a specific memory of Girard that he failed to capture on film. During his years photographing the Walled City in the late 1980s, he stumbled upon a Cathay Pacific flight attendant, dressed in her pristine red uniform walking into the dark, dripping alleyways of the Walled City. Girard rushed to follow her to get the shot, but she disappeared into the labyrinth before he could raise his camera. For decades, this remained "the untaken photo"—a memory that felt too cinematic to be real, yet was.
"I never saw that scene again, of a Cathay crew member, uniformed and perfectly groomed, heading into the Walled City, and so it’s kind of burned into my memory as 'the one that got away.'" Greg Girard.
